Rocco-s Pov 17 Here

Her face did something complicated. Relief. Worry. A flicker of the woman she used to be before life made her careful. “Okay, Roo. Be safe.”

Rocco grabbed his jacket. He didn’t know who he wanted to be tonight—the angry boy, the sad boy, the boy who kissed girls in closets and then ran. He only knew that staying in this room, with its museum of old selves, was a kind of dying. rocco-s pov 17

He typed back: “Maybe.”

She looked up, startled.

“Yeah,” he said. And for once, he didn’t say it like a lie. Her face did something complicated

Rocco stared at the screen. The point. A gravel beach down by the old quarry where kids went to drink warm beer and pretend they weren’t terrified of Monday morning. Last week, he’d watched a girl named Mia throw a bottle into the lake so hard it skipped six times. She’d laughed, but her eyes had been dead. He recognized that look. It was the same one he saw in the mirror after his father’s monthly phone call—the one where the old man promised to come to a baseball game and then found a reason to cancel by the second sentence. A flicker of the woman she used to